Monitoring conditions of or near subjects such as human beings, animals, and machines is often used to track processes, detect abnormalities, log events and create alerts. For example, working mothers of infants and young children oftentimes leave their children for long time periods in the care of others. Experience shows that, at times, care givers abuse, neglect young children and infants in their care or expose these children to harmful conditions. For example, there are reported cases where infants were left unattended in a car in a hot day with all the car's windows rolled up. Therefore, parents are often concerned about the wellbeing of their children when they are at work.
One solution to mitigate the parents' stress and anxiety involves installing a hidden video camera in an attempt to monitor the environment of the child and its care giver (e.g., nanny or babysitter). Various camera-based systems are known in the field as “NannyCam” systems. NannyCam systems are expensive and, once positioned, the hidden cameras are stationary. Therefore, this type of solution is efficient only if the monitored subject (e.g., an infant) remains in the Field of View (“FOV”) of the camera. However, the care giver may sometimes take the child or infant from a monitored room to an unmonitored room, or to a nearby park, where the camera is useless.
Another solution involves monitoring sounds. However, sound monitoring systems leave the decision regarding the condition of the infant to the parents. Not knowing exactly what the parents should expect, they may overlook meaningful or critical information related to mistreatment of their child. Other solutions involve attempting to monitor child activity or to monitor the location of a child.
Such solutions are not user friendly and provide raw data which has to then be analyzed, if possible. These solutions tend to produce excessive amounts of irrelevant data which at times may mask important data that cannot be easily ascertained.